The report describes key milestones in protecting democratic elections, protecting the rights of content creators, and supporting the open source community
SAN FRANCISCO, December 20, 2024–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the leading connectivity cloud company, today released its fourth legendary impact report. The report describes the company's efforts to advance its mission of creating a better Internet and support global initiatives such as protecting the open Internet and building an innovation economy. Highlights of this annual report include help securing elections and other critical infrastructure, advances in encryption transparency, and tools that allow content creators to take back control of AI bots. The report also includes support for Internet standards development, open source projects, and the next generation of great startups.
“In 2024, we saw half the world’s population gain the right to vote amid ongoing conflict and social unrest.” “Cloudflare is committed to protecting critical voices and democratic processes and ensuring creators are in control in an increasingly complex digital landscape about their work,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “Whether it was securing global elections or helping content creators limit AI bots' access to their content, I'm proud of how the Cloudflare team is supporting needs that are bigger than all of us Pledge to help build a better, open and secure Internet.
Key milestones highlighted in Cloudflare's 2024 Impact Report include:
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Engaging 90+ political campaigns and 60+ local media sites in preparation for the 2024 US elections: Cloudflare provides free cybersecurity services to state and local election websites, political campaigns and other related entities through its partnership with Defending Digital Campaigns. Although Cloudflare noted a significant increase in DDoS attacks on political entities ahead of the November 5 US election, the company did not observe these attacks causing significant disruption.
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Global Election Coverage with Cloudflare Radar: In 2024, elections took place in more than 70 countries. Cloudflare monitors internet traffic, attacks, and potential outages during elections around the world through our free public resource Cloudflare Radar, and publishes these results to provide civil society partners with a better understanding of what is happening online during the electoral process.
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Enabling Regaining Control of Content in the Age of AI: Cloudflare has introduced new tools to enable transparent exchanges between websites that want more control over their content and AI model providers that need new data sources. Now website owners can block, audit and control how AI bots access their websites.
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Expanding access to accessible, powerful and responsible AI with GPUs in more than 180 cities: AI applications built with Workers AI are deployed directly to our edge network, making them immediately available and nearly infinitely scalable to users around the world. Workers AI helps customers control costs and access popular AI models with low latency thanks to AI-enabled GPUs distributed closer to users around the world.
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Over 2,900 vulnerable Internet resources are protected from an average of 95.8 million attacks every day – and all for free: Human rights defenders, journalists, humanitarian organizations and political dissidents are often vulnerable to cyberattacks. Working with 54 civil society partners, Cloudflare's Project Galileo – now in its 10th year – protects public stakeholders from attacks aimed at silencing them online.
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Providing the open source community with free services through Project Alexandria: Open source software (OSS) is critical to the continued health of the Internet. Cloudflare launched Project Alexandria to provide recurring annual credits and an expanded range of free services to enable OSS projects to not only survive, but thrive.
